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Don’t Poke Fun at Thorns (They Hurt)
Published on December 12, 2007 by Phaelia 
Analysis, Spells and Talents 
33 Comments
After Mark of the Wild, the Druid damage shield Thorns is probably one of the spells most often complained about:
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Let’s take an inventory of all the perceived issues with this spell:
- It doesn’t do enough damage. Some have suggested making it scale with spell damage.
- There’s no group buff version, making it inconvenient to cast. (The idea of making it a group buff is terribad. You’ll see why below.)
- The duration is too short at only 10 minutes, one third the duration of our single-target Mark of the Wild spell.
- It can’t be cast while in Tree of Life.
Optionally, a Druid willing to invest thirteen or more points in the Balance tree can pick up the 3/3 Brambles talent, a talent which increase the damage taken by 75%:
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With 3/3 Brambles, that would increase the damage per hit by Thorns to 47. One has to admit that doesn’t sound like a lot when you consider mobs hitting cloth for 4k in some Heroics.
Thorns as AoE Aggro
One often overlooked fact about Thorns is that the aggro generated is on a per mob basis. That means that the total threat per second is multiplied for every mob that’s beating on (but not casting spells upon) a thorned target. Larger pulls means more aggro from Thorns, assuming your tank is able to maintain their attention. At the same time, the threat generated by healing is considered “global threat” or spread among all the mobs on your hate list. I want to reiterate that point since it’s a really important one that many people miss: Threat from healing is distributed evenly among all targets on your hate list. So for every additional mob in your group pull, you’re getting more threat from Thorns and less threat from healing done.
Determining Thorns Threat
To determine the threat of Thorns, both with and without 3/3 Brambles, I’m going to make the following assumptions:
- The mobs attacking the tank hit at a speed of 2.0 or once every two seconds.
- The tank is a Protection-specced Warrior using Defensive Stance and having 3/3 Defiance for a total threat modification of +45%.
- The tank has a combined 35% rate of Dodge + Parry + miss.
The threat per second of Thorns without 3/3 Brambles can therefore be expressed as:
TPS of Thornsw/o Brambles = Threat Multiplier * Thorns DPS * (1 – % Time Thorns Ineffective)
OR 1.45 * (25 dmg/2 sec) * (1 – 0.35) = 11.78 TPS
To calculate this value with the Brambles talent, we simply adjust the damage output per hit of Thorns:
TPS of Thornsw/Brambles = 1.45 * (43.75 dmg/2 sec) * (1 – 0.35) = 20.62 TPS
Not coincidentally, the TPS increase from picking up Brambles is 75%, the same increase to the amount of damage done by each hit.
Notably, a Warrior using chain Thunder Clap will generate around 350 threat every 4 seconds per mob on up to four mobs (discussion via WoWWiki.com). With Thorns + Brambles, you’d be granting him an additional 24% threat on top of that. And don’t forget that the threat generated by Thorns applies to all mobs, not only four.
Determining Lifebloom Threat
Lifebloom is one of our largest and most efficient sources of healing output, and the threat generated from it is both steady and periodic, making it a great source of comparison against the threat generated by Thorns. To determine the threat per second of a triple stack of Lifebloom, I’m going to make the following assumptions:
- None of the healing done is overheal (which does not generate threat).
- The healer has 5/5 Subtlety (-20% threat), 5/5 Empowered Rejuvenation (+15% bonus to the HoT portion), and 5/5 Gift of Nature (+10% to all healing spells).
- The healer has 1650 +Healing.
To easily and quickly determine the scaling of Lifebloom per stack and with the appropriate talents, I compared the total healed per tick with my gear on and without my gear. Both times, I made sure to remove my [Idol of the Emerald Queen] since it affects the periodic healing of Lifebloom. From these two values, I was able to determine the scaling of Lifebloom with talents to be approximately 58.9%:
Healing per Tick0 +Healing = 42.67
Healing per Tick1595 +Healing = 199
Amount Healed from Bonus Healing = +Healing * Coefficient
Coefficient = Amount Healed from Bonus Healing / +Healing
(199 – 43) * 6 / 1595 = 58.9%
From this coefficient, we can determine the total amount healed by the HoT portion of a single Lifebloom application for our assumed 1650 +Healing:
Total Healed by Lifebloom HoT = Base Heal from Lifebloom HoT + (Coefficient * +Healing) = 273 + (0.589 * 1650) = 1246.5
If we divide the total healed by 6 (for the number of times Lifebloom ticks before being refreshed), we find that Lifebloom will heal for 207.8 HP per second:
Healed per Tick = 1246.5 / 6 = 207.8
Since each point of healing is worth half a point of threat, we find that a single application of Lifebloom generates 103.9 Threat per second at our assumed 1650 +Healing. Since we’re assuming the healer is specced for Subtlety, we multiply this value by 80% to get 83.1 TPS per application. Three applications (rolling Lifebloom) means that we multiply this value by 3 to arrive at our final value, 249.3 TPS:
TPS of Lifebloom x 1 = Total Healing Done / 2 = 103.9 TPS
TPS of Lifebloom x 1Subtlety = 103.9 * 0.8 = 83.1
TPS of Lifebloom x 3Subtlety = 83.1 * 3 = 249.3 TPS
Once again, this number assumes that none of the healing done is overhealing. It represents the threat generated each second that is evenly distributed among however many targets are on the healer’s hate list.
TPS of Thorns vs. TPS of Lifebloom x 3
To determine how much of your Lifebloom threat is effectively mitigated by casting Thorns, we can plot these values against the total number of mobs present and affected by Thorns:
From the above graph, note the following:
- At four mobs, casting Thorns and having 3/3 Brambles would effectively “eat” 34% of the threat being generated by a rolling stack of Lifebloom. Without Brambles, it’s only 19%. That’s a 14.2% increase to the amount of threat countered from Brambles alone.
- At five mobs, the amount of threat countered by Thorns + Brambles jumps to 41%. Without Brambles, it’s only 24%. That’s a 17.7% increase to the amount of threat countered from Brambles alone.
Note: While this graph assumes that no mobs present are crowd controlled and therefore all are being affected by Thorns you can determine the adjusted TPS being generated by Thorns by sliding to the left along the x-axis a number of units equal to the number of mobs being crowd controlled. Healing aggro, unfortunately, remains the same.
Conclusion
Thorns is not worthless. For 400 mana spent outside of combat, you effectively give your tank a cushion for aggro, allowing him to continue building threat on mobs he isn’t even focused on. And if you’re going to be spending the points in the Balance tree to pick up Insect Swarm anyway, you should consider the value of Brambles, especially if you frequently run instances (multi-mob pulls are less of an issue in raids). And no, you don’t want a group version of Thorns. Except maybe for Arenas. And only if it didn’t consume another costly reagent.
P.S. For a bit of fun, I went ahead and extrapolated the number of mobs necessary to counteract all of the TPS generated by a triple-stack of Lifebloom. It’s 12 with Brambles and 21 without. So feel free to link this article the next time you accidentally aggro say … 2-4 additional groups!
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*hugs* .-= Softi´s last blog ..Dum di dum di dum =-.
Thorns is just just like the imp fire shield, especially for defense paladins or when using a off tank pet. If this type of mechanic got buffed, paladins suddenly would go through the roof in tanking.
Every bit helps, even though Thorns isn’t really such a big improvement over not having it. When being hit by fast melee classes (pets, rogues, feral druids) untalented Thorns bring about 25DPS which doesn’t sound impressive either, but just remember some talents from other classes increase their DPS in 1% or similar figures. I cast it whenever it doesn’t hurt [to the target
].
However I would never put talent points in Brambles (if I were balance, that is).
Also it’s slightly dissapointing when compared to things such as mages’ Molten Armor (75 damage per hit, +3% spell crit, -5% crit to enemies; lasts 30 minutes). Sure, we can buff others, but I’m sure you get the idea
I just love thorns, and even though I used it to do extra dps in my low-lvl days, it’s not a dps utility anymore – unless your in a lowlvl area and collecting mobs that die just because they’re hitting you while you’re not actually hitting them back (which is fun).
One of the downsides I’d say is the duration, but then again; you’ll only cast it when there are multiple mobs and your tank is a warrior or druid – paladins can keep their tps up fine.
Slight drawback: you still have to wait for every mob to actually hit the tank – otherwise they won’t get the damage from thorns.
Best thing: you don’t have to rely upon the skill of the tank to create a base threat on the mobs by either triggering thunderclap, swipe or hitting them one by one. You can let thorns take care of it and you’ll only have to worry about 130% threat above an Actual Value instead of 0 threat generated by a linked pull.
For actual dps though thorns don’t cut it, nor makes any difference – but I seriously doubt there’s any need to buff thorns and have Blizzard perform endless patching and researching whether or not it makes thorns overpowered. Let them worry about more important things…
Thorns is just a buffable retribution aura. Paladins have to waste their aura for this kind of utility and the whole party is affected. As you said, full party buff of reflective damage is not a good thing.
Nice analysis as always.
As it seems it is almost worth remembering it. Still a quite marginal effect though to give us any spots over other healing classes…
Maybe if it gave some extra avoidance or some damage mitigation as well…?
Thorns is defiantly a case of every little bit helps, but that doesn’t mean its all that useful. I do put it on the tanks in raids and instances because there is no down side for doing so, but if I forget to refresh it is not missed.
Brambles is not worth the talent points. There are only two exceptions to this rule. 1. Solo Player that like to pull multiple mobs. It greatly increases the damage on the CCed target and makes pull easier. 2. Raiding Moonkin, can put 2 points in brambles because there is no better place to put them. Unfortunately Moonkin are forced to spend at least three points in Natures Grasp, Control of Nature, or Brambles. All three talents have very little value in raids or instances, but Brambles is arguably the best of the worst.
For a resto druid, Brambles is a horrible choice. While an extra 9 TPS doesn’t hurt, I have to believe there are better places in the resto tree to spend those points. If 9 TPS really is the difference between pulling aggro and not pulling aggro then there is a problem with the tank.
@GMillerd: Yeah, I think that applying spell damage to Thorns would be potentially very overpowering. Unless the coefficient were just ridiculously small. However, doing so should really affect all tanks equally (Druid, Paladin, Warrior) with perhaps a slight advantage to those tanks that favor mitigation over avoidance.
@Ermengol: No, it’s not tremendous by any means. But it’s still worth casting and there’s really no reason not to do so. I have beaten a certain Rogue in a long duel, mostly from him impaling himself on my thorny exterior (while trying to reach my gooey center).
@Kwast: Thorns is definitely not a DPS utility. That’s why I expressed its contribution in terms of TPS rather than DPS. The fact that you can basically give them 24% additional threat over what they would be able to generate themselves by spamming Thunderclap every 4 seconds is pretty great. If you were to factor out 3/3 Defiance (1.15 Threat modifier), Thorns Bramble would likely compensate for the lack. You should always be using Thorns on a non Prot tank.
@Crythia: Good point about the Paladin aura. I wonder why Blizzard thought that would be a good idea. ^_^
@Dimitris: Oh certainly. Thorns is not about to give us the advantage for getting raid spots, especially since its usefulness is greatest in 5-man instances.
@Graylo: Like I said, Thorns in a raid environment will be less signficant than in a 5-man instance. In a raid, your tank is unlikely to have more than one or two mobs beating on him at a time. In an instance, especially in places like Shadow Labs or certain parts of Botanica, you might have 4-6 mobs all at once. So if your focus is PvE raiding, it’s probably not worth the investment. But if you’re levelling up and running lots of instances, it just might be!
Talking about thorns, I remember one time I went to Crossroads. Now I think of it, it wasn’t exactly the smartest way to spend the evening, but I wanted to test how much damage thorns could do.. while annoying some hordies. I just stood there in Tree of Life form with thorns on, dancing and mocking everyone while outhealing all damage from guards. Since technically I wasn’t attacking them and it was(is) a PvE server I wasn’t pvp-flagged, so the few 70s that came to “help” could only /chicken at me.
It took a LONG time to kill the first guard, so I left, considerably disappointed..
I completely agree that you should have thorns up on the tank when tanking multiple mobs in any situation. In fact It should probably be up for all encounters weather it is one mob or six.
However, that doesn’t mean that brambles is a good talent for a resto druid to have. Yes, it would help, but I have to believe that there is a better use of those talent points. What would you give up to get the talent? Looking at your spec I don’t see any good choices.
For me it comes back to the quality of the tank. If 9 TPS is the difference between you pulling aggro and the tank keeping it then there is a problem. I am not an expert on warrior tanking, but as I understand it, if you are relying on Thunderclap to maintain aggro on multiple mobs your doing it wrong.
As I said in my prior comment, I believe that there are only two situations where investing in Brambles is justified. 1. The soloest that likes to pull multiple mobs and CC one. Since roots scales with spell damage this can do significant damage to the mob before you get to him. 2. A raiding Moonkin might want to put 2 points into the talent because there is no better place for them.
Sorry to sound arguementative, but I strongly believe that Brambles is one of the worst talents in the game.
@Ermengol: Haha … great story. And I’m surprised that your Thorns was able to eventually kill ANY of the guards. =)
@Graylo: No worries! I think yours and the comments of others here have convinced me that 3 x Brambles is not worth investing in, at least not for where I am right now. Were I still doing instances, however, I might consider it. As it is, I think I’d like to spec out of Improved Tranquility since I haven’t used it even once since respeccing (there’s little use for it in raids, and I haven’t done any instances in the last little while). I knew I shouldn’t have listened to Mr. Phae about those 2 points! /shakes fist
Yea, Improved Tranquility is probably not needed. I don’t see it used that often in raid. The only time I see it used consistantly in raids is when Kazzak enrages. Even then the tank should be so far ahead in threat that it isn’t an issue.
However, using your Brambles/Thorns arguement, it could be helpful in instances during bad pulls and other situation with multiple mobs where the entire party is taking damage.
Alright. I will be quite now.
but but… improved tranquility is awesome
It’s a PoM for druids.
Quite interesting article, like the others btw.
I would just have mentioned that Thorns is as useless as my grandMa socks while tanking casters. And we always have casters to tank in heroics or 5 men dungeon.
So you’ll have to count the threat on each Melee Mob.
But that’s quite unsignificant.
@Hikilune: That’s a great point about casting mobs. I’ll edit the article to reflect that! Thanks!
I see some inconsistencies in the comments above that I’m curious about, mostly related to paladin tanking.
kwast said “One of the downsides I’d say is the duration, but then again; you’ll only cast it when there are multiple mobs and your tank is a warrior or druid – paladins can keep their tps up fine.” Why would you not cast it on a paladin tank? Thorns will move the threat cap up, meaning that might can be given to the rogue or hunter instead of kings. Or salvation can be removed from the healer and replaced with kings or wisdom. Thorns should always be on your tank, as it makes the encounters smoother.
With regards to Retribution Aura, it is similar to a group version of Thorns, but has a different mechanical application of threat. In most AoE tanking situations, Retribution is the aura of choice. While Thorns delivers the reflective threat to the person who was hit, the reflective threat from Retribution Aura goes to the paladin regardless of who was hit.
It’s all hypothetical, but you forgot to take into account the fact that Thunderclap slows attacks by 10%, thus lowering the contribution of Thorns!
@Anise: Do you know if Retribution Aura stacks with Thorns?
@Mushin: As you point out, since the attack speed was completely manufactured, I didn’t see any need to include slowing effects such as Thunderclap. We could just assume that they normally attack at a rate of 2.2 and that TC would reduce it to 2.0 since it’s just intended as a hypothetical situation. =)
Well as I was quoted, I thought I’d respond…
I didn’t mean thorns aren’t supposed to be cast on palatanks, I just flattened down the usefulness of thorns on a palatank during AoE situations in comparison to druid and warrior tanks.
The paladin not only has ret-aura with 26dmg thus at least 52 threat per hit, but also things like Consecration (512 dmg AoE for 8 seconds, modified with 95.24% bonus spell damage, etc) and whatever insane abilities, buffs and modifiers the paladin has. Compare that to 25-47dmg per hit sticky thorns and get mugged by people who’re bored with the softypansy thorns and want to see some action in the movie theaters near you showing exploding and lit up area’s with a paladin standing his or her ground while zillions of mindless zombies and icky aliens there die in the name of the Holy Light.
Thorns and Ret Aura stack. Add the reflective damage from the Darkmoon Faire deck and you’ve got a nice lead of reflective threat with meleeing mobs. Consecrate can’t always be counted on for threat if you’re trying to avoid crowd contol. It’s also a mana hog unless you downrank and stack spellpower to compensate.
@Anise: Thank you for that explanation! I had been told in the past not to bother casting Thorns on Paladins because their reflective aura would simply overwrite it. It’s nice to know that it’s still doing some good.
I like the point you are trying to make, but I have a slight nitpick on your threat calculations. Healing threat being divided among all enemies is a common misconception, it’s actually applied evenly to all enemies. So if you heal for 1000, every enemy you are in combat with gains 500 threat against you, regardless of how many there are.
For an example think of boss fights with lots of little adds, a classic one would be Broodlord, from way back in Blackwing lair. You have one boss and many small whelps that are constantly pulled into the raid and are being aoe’d down. If healing aggro was actually split across all targets in combat, then the boss would only get a small portion of the threat done by healing and never aggro onto the healers. I’ve personally pulled heal aggro on that fight many times.
That’s just a really extreme case, but you could apply this to any boss fight with multiple mobs. Although with the added tanking tools and getting salvation (I’m horde) since BC healing threat has been much less of a problem. But before the expansion it was definitely a concern for all horde healers and they could tell you that having adds in a boss fight doesn’t lower the chance of pulling heal aggro.
@Sayari: I am not 100% convinced that Healing threat is not divided among all engaged mobs. This dynamic is explained here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Threat
“Healing threat is global, and is normally .5x of the amount healed. Healing effects cause no threat if the target is already at full health.
Example: Player 1 is involved in combat with 5 mobs. Player 2 (priest) heals Player 1 for 1000 health, and has no threat reduction talents. A 1000 heal generates 500 threat, however that 500 threat is split amongst the 5 mobs. Each of the 5 mobs now has 100 threat towards Player 2. ”
If healing threat were not divided up like this, I imagine it would be nigh impossible for tanks to maintain mobs’ attention in multi-group pulls. Their incoming damage would go up but their threat would not be able to keep pace. Meanwhile, our threat generated would increase along with their damage taken (the damage we would have to heal). It’s hard to imagine anyone other than a Paladin being able to tank under such a scenario.
I did a little more looking around and I think you are right. I haven’t raided in quite a while and haven’t really been keeping up on the detailing of game mechanics. I just have so many cases where it seems that it must aggro them all (broodlord, ony with whelps, etc…), but then I can see examples where that can’t be the case as well (gluth zombie kiting). It might just be that the adds in the cases I was thinking of weren’t explicitly in combat with me or my heal targets.
@Sayari: Maybe in the case where you pull aggro it’s because, as you say, they haven’t been engaged in combat. Or maybe that no one has gotten any threat on them at all yet (this is one of the things that makes Paladin Consecrate so awesome on fights like Morogrim when the Murlocs come running out). Thanks for checking into this! =)
Thanks for the article. I’ve had a few points in Brambles for some time now and I was just wondering today how much threat it generates. Basically a few months back I developed a spec that I’ve gotten comfortable with it’s 13/0/48. Basically I’ve taken all talents in the resto tree that will help me in tree form, and came to the conclusion that Improved Tranquility wasn’t of much use in raiding. In the end I had 13 talents to put where I saw fit. So because I do get bored and thus pvp some and I knew I liked casting moonfire (Improved Moonfire), Insect Swarm, cyclone(Control of Nature), and Nature’s Grasp (Improved). In the end I had 2 spare talents and I dumped them in Brambles. So there we are =)
@Breanainn: Cool – any build I look at generally includes 3/3 Brambles. While it’s annoying to have to rebuff Thorns every 10 minutes, it’s gratifying to know that you’re being asked to do so because you’ve opted to maximize your buff for threat generation. Tanks get really attached to it. =)
I’ve been playing around with 3/3 Brambles as a resto druid raiding Sunwell. I’m 14/0/47 right now (basically no HT talents and 4/5 subtlety). I’ve also gone back to get my 3 piece T1 bonus (4 dmg to thorns, increases duration by 50%). The 4 dmg is increased by 3/3 Brambles as well. This puts my thorns at 51 dmg and lasts 15 minutes.
Looking at a WWS log for M’uru last night, it seems that my thorns did almost 22k damage for the fight:
http://wowwebstats.com/lnp1icb3jeri5?s=2730-3130&ab=280
It could have done more but I was under the impression that ret aura and thorns did not stack so I did not cast it on our prot pally (there are 4 tanks for that fight). Since another poster here commented it does stack, I will have to experiment with that.
The biggest issue I am noticing now is that it seems that thorns damage will eat a charge of the enhancement shaman ability Stormstrike (20% bonus dmg from nature, 2 charges). That makes me think a tank tanking only one mob should never have thorns on if there is an enhancement shaman in the raid. Also more importantly, we raid with an enhancement and elemental shaman for every boss. The elemental shaman can make a huge DPS difference if he gets to use those stormstrike nature damage bonuses over thorns. However if a tank is tanking multiple mobs and threat on those mobs is an issue, the stormstrike will help hold threat even more. You will see from my WWS that my 51 pt thorns did 64 damage with stormstrike up.
Has anyone seen any other issues where thorns should not be used?
@Shygar: That’s pretty cool for a spell you only have to cast once before the fight starts. And thank you for the tip about Stormstrike. I wasn’t familiar with that at all, but it’s great to be aware of it.
The only other case that I’m aware of where Thorns shouldn’t be used are on the Leotheras fight. Supposedly if your demon impales himself on a damage shield, you don’t get credit for having killed him and will end up mind controlled.
It’s not a bad idea to use Thorns on your whole group on fights with no aggro table (like the Priestess fight in MgT).
Spreading the word. Brambles won’t help tank threat, unless the tank has Brambles.
The thorns you cast on others don’t benefit from Brambles.
Test results at http://elitistjerks.com/1079130-post269.html
I first noticed this when my guild was doing a raid on the Horde leaders. I was 75 at the time so my DPS wasn’t too good, but I was hoping to brag on the amount of damage my Thorns added to the raid. I was dissapointed when I looked at the WWS and it was obvious that I was the only one benefitting from Brambles.
It was fun to see that the first Thorns entry in my combat log was 3 damage, done by a Tauren to a mob outside of Ogrimmar
@Erdluf: YIKES … that really, really sucks. I wonder if it was an intentional change.